New, Blazing Fast APM dashboards!

You may have noticed that for the past 6 weeks we have been awfully quiet. Today I get to reveal what we have been up to.

The Problem - Everything is Too Slooow

A few months ago, we started noticing that as we started capturing and displaying more of your transaction data, the DripStat GUI started to slow down. This was especially the case for the ‘Transactions’ page where showing the sorted list of your transactions could take > 10 seconds. A lot of times there would be a timeout or our server would throw an exception.

This made DripStat almost unusable. This wasn’t the experience we wanted for ourselves or for our users. So at one point, we decided to halt progress on everything else and make this a priority. There was no point moving forward if the existing stuff wasn’t up to snuff.

Solution - Druid and Blazing, Ultra Fast Dashboards

Initially, we had started out with a SAAS time series database to get the product out asap. Clearly it wasn’t scaling with the amount of data we wanted to query and display in one go. We researched a number of options and finally settled on Druid as our backend.

The technical details deserve a separate blog post but suffice it to say this is the biggest overhaul of our backend since the inception of DripStat. The result is a blazing fast UI that completely changes the DripStat experience.

Check out the Live Demo and you will see that almost everything loads in a blink of an eye!

More UI Enhancements

We made some other enhancements to the UI while we were at it. The Application list page now shows the Throughput and Avg Response Time for the past minute of each application.

Note that this is data that needs to be aggregated across all the JVMs connected to DripStat for your account (which could be 100s) and still needs to be displayed in < 1 second. With our previous backend we couldn’t do this, but now you will barely notice any speed difference at all.

Starting off afresh

To be clear, we take the handling of your data very seriously. We try to make sure our data collectors have as close to 100% uptime as possible and only discard data after the 90 day threshold. In this particular case however, migrating data from the format of our previous backend to the new one would have taken us a few more weeks to deploy the new backend. Since we are in preview mode currently and it is more valuable to show you the data for ‘now’ in a great way rather than show you time outs and error messages for a couple more weeks, we decided to cut the cord and just start off afresh. This means as of writing this post, you will only be able to see 24 hours of data which is when we started the new backend. As we move to the paid offering however, we will obviously never do something like this.

Whats Next

Expect much faster updates to everything. The UI, the agent and the game. We will soon be launching the paid version of DripStat and we have a huge surprise waiting for you there.